2. Citizenship Education in Mexico the Depoliticisation of Adolescence Through Secondary School

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International Studies in Sociology of Education

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Citizenship education in Mexico: thedepoliticisation of adolescence through secondaryschool

Leonel Pérez-Expósito

To cite this article: Leonel Pérez-Expósito (2015) Citizenship education in Mexico: the

depoliticisation of adolescence through secondary school, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 25:3, 225-257, DOI: 10.1080/09620214.2015.1076705

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Citizenship education in Mexico: the depoliticisation of adolescence through secondary school

Leonel Pérez-Expósito*

Departamento de Relaciones Sociales, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana,Unidad Xochimilco, D.F., México

( Received 3 October 2014; nal version received 23 July 2015)

Recent contributions have argued about the depoliticisation of

citizenship education (CE), mainly through theoretical and documentaryanalyses, and based on the European context. Nonetheless, there is alack of eld studies which can provide empirical evidence about howdoes the depoliticisation of CE actually operate. Based on a mixed-method research in Mexico City’s secondary schools, this paper showshow the contemporary approach to CE, instead of looking at nurturingchildren’s and adolescents’ politicity, contributes to pupils’ depoliticisa-tion. Among different potential characterisations of political participation(PP), the curriculum of CE circumscribes it within the arena of formal politics, from which students are largely excluded in the present. Addi-tionally, CE promotes a range of practices of participation which are

deprived from a political meaning. Students appropriate them discur-sively, but perceive limited opportunities for perform them, especially inschool. Through the depoliticisation of CE, adolescents mostly learn that PP is a promise of inclusion in the future, while the idea of active citi-zenship becomes reduced to a correct discourse about largely imper-ceptible practices in students’ everyday life. The article stresses the needof shifting the priority of CE in Mexico from the formal curriculum tothe transformation of school practices, in order to develop students’ politicity through participation.

Keywords: citizenship education; depoliticisation; secondary schools;adolescence

Introduction

In England, during the late 1960s and the 1970s, authors like Crick, Lister and Heater, argued for the need of political education (Crick, 2000; Crick &Heater, 1977), and what they called ‘ political literacy’. In their view, the political was understood as a ‘dimension of human experience’, which

*Emails: [email protected], [email protected]

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2015Vol. 25, No. 3, 225 – 257, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2015.1076705

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realises whenever there is ‘conict of interests and ideals’ and a ‘differentialdistribution of power ’ and resources. These ‘ politics of everyday life’ allowsto nd the political ‘in the family, the locality, educational institutions, clubsand societies and in informal groups of all kind’ (Crick, 2000, p. 65).

Accordingly, the type of participation that this perspective aimed to promotein students was clearly political. Political participation (PP) becomes inclu-sive of children and adolescents, and it is not restricted into the distant arena of the formal political system.

Conversely, during the 1990s and early 2000s, we observed a new waveof citizenship education (CE) programmes across different countries, Eng-land included, in which the political was demoted in importance. PP waseither replaced by, or ambiguously combined with less controversial cate-gories (Berger, 2011; Pérez Expósito, 2014b), such as civic engagement;civic, citizenship, social or democratic participation; active citizenship;

community involvement or community service (Education Commission of the States [ECS], 2000; Great Britain, 1998; Ministerio de Educación Nacional [MEN], 2004; Pérez Expósito & McCowan, 2013; SEP, 2007,2011a). Certainly, as Crick acknowledges, ‘“ political education and politicalliteracy” […] might now seem too narrow a term to catch our meaningcompared to “CE”’ (Great Britain, 1998, p. 11). CE has suffered an expan-sion in its content and purposes, many of which are suf ciently justied.However, as Frazer (2007) points out, this path has entailed a ‘looseness’ inthe denition of citizenship, and particularly a distancing from its political

character.Different authors have made important contributions to the analysis of

this process of depoliticisation of CE (e.g. Biesta, 2011; Frazer, 2007; PérezExpósito, 2014b; Straume, 2015), but mainly through theoretical and docu-mentary analyses, and based on the European context. There is a lack of eld research, which can provide empirical evidence about how does thedepoliticisation of CE actually operate. This article is a product of a mixed-method research that included qualitative work in two schools from con-trasting delegaciones (municipalities) of Mexico City, and a representativesurvey (n = 828) of third-gr ade students from all the general secondaryschools in these two areas.1 Based on these data, the article analyses the process of depoliticisation of CE in Mexico, especially in the secondaryschools of these two territorial demarcations.

Elsewhere, I have theoretically formulated two ways of depoliticisationof CE (Pérez Expósito, 2014b). In the following, I develop them through anempirical analysis, in order to argue that while CE aims to form active citi-zens involved in PP, it rather contributes to adolescents’ exclusion from political action. On the one hand, the article shows how among different potential characterisations of PP, the curriculum of CE circumscribes it

within the arena of formal politics. In it, students will only be included inthe future, because they are not entitled yet with the political rights that are

226 L. Pérez-Expósito


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necessary for an ef cacious and full participation in this domain. Students’representations of PP resemble the curricular conception, and reveal their exclusion from this type of participation. On the other hand, the article sus-tains that CE promotes a wide range of practices of participation which are

displaced from their potential political meaning. Students, teachers and principals appropriate these practices discursively, but perceive a lack of opportunities for perform them, especially in the school. Through CE, I willargue, adolescents mostly learn that PP is a promise of inclusion in thefuture, while the idea of active citizenship becomes reduced to a correct discourse about largely imperceptible practices in students’ everyday life.

The political meaning of participation: diversity and change

The analysis of the depoliticisation of CE in Mexico requires a previous

conceptual analysis about the variety of potential meanings of the political .As noticed in the introduction, what allowed the centrality of the political inthe English proposal from the 1970s was a particular conception of it,which permitted to locate the political in students’ everyday lives. Withinthis framework, pupils’ participation in practices that involve ‘conict of interests and ideals’ and a differential distribution of power and resources(Crick, 2000, p. 65) become forms of PP. Therefore, the way in which the political character of participation is understood in CE’s programmes is cru-cial to determine whether the curriculum advances a political or apolitical

proposal, and –

more importantly –

whether it promotes the politicisation or depoliticisation of children and adolescents’ lives. Thus, a depoliticised CEdoes not necessarily entail the removal of the political, but rather toappropriate a particular meaning of it.

The forms of getting politically involved change according to different times, places and cultures (Norris, 2002, 2007; Pérez Expósito, 2014b).Among this diversity, it is dif cult to identify the distinctiveness of PP inrelation to other forms of participation. Commonly, PP is dened as actionsthat citizens undertake in order to inuence the structure and composition of government, as well as its policies (Conway, 2000; Verba & Nie, 1987).

Yet, this conception is based on a particular meaning of the political , whichdenes it as a domain characterised by the presence of government, and therelation of inuence that citizens establish with it. In this view, the govern-ment represents the entity where truly political decisions are made: thosewhich are collective and sovereign, from which it is not possible to beexempt due to their territorial inclusion and coercive force (Sartori, 1973,1992).

Nonetheless, to dene the political character of participation by the pres-ence of government overlooks what Norris (2002) understands as contempo-

rary diversi

cations in the targets of PP, like actions against transnationalcorporations without seeing the government as an intermediary (Lam, 2003;

International Studies in Sociology of Education 227


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Pérez Expósito, 2014b; Pérez Expósito, Ortiz-Tirado, González, & Gordillo,2012). It also usually restricts PP within the national domain and disregardsa transnational arena for political action (Ruggiero & Montagna, 2008).

One way of avoiding the previous limitations is to dene the political by

its public character. According to Arendt (1958/ 1998), for instance, the political emerges between humans; both beyond the human being as a meta- physical idea, and as an isolated individual. Politics transforms those whoare absolutely diverse in isolation into relatively diverse through an encoun-ter based on a relative equality. This can only be achieved beyond the pri-vate realm: ‘the distinctive nature of the political or public realm wasdeveloped by the contrasts which Arendt drew between it and the concept of “the social”. The latter signied all of the activities and relationshipswhich, by nature, were “ private” (Wolin, 1983, p. 9).

To characterise the political by its public character or by the presence of

government, illustrates what Leftwich (2004) categorises as approaches tothe political as a particular arena (the public realm or the governmentaldomain). Conversely, the author nds that from other perspectives the political is mainly understood as a process. An example of it is the view of the political as a deliberative procedure of decision-making, characterised by rational argumentation among participants with an equal status, but with competing views about the common good, and oriented by the possibility of consensus (Cohen, 2003; Gutmann & Thompson, 2004; Habermas,1996; Rawls, 1993, 2001; Thompson, 2008). While Rawls (1993) still

restricts this process into a public-governmental arena (McCarthy, 1994),others like Cohen (2003) argue that, in a democratic society, deliberative politics should be a procedure to be found in every institutionalisedcontext.2

In addition to Leftwich’s classication, Franzé (2004), in his analysis of the concept of the political in Aristotle, Weber and Schmitt, suggests threemore standpoints: to dene the political by its ends, means or as a particular type of relation. The rst approach means, for instance, to understand the political as an activity whose end is the achievement of a just society (e.g.Aristotle, 1946; Rawls, 2001). The second can be illustrated by the concep-

tion of violence or the potential use of force as the distinctive means of political activity (e.g. Nicholson, 2004; Weber, 1920/ 1972, 1922/ 1978).Lastly, the third approach identies the political with a particular relation between persons and groups. For instance, when these are arranged asfriends/enemies (Schmitt, 1932/ 1996) or adversaries (Mouffe, 2005), or as power relations between men and women that transcend the public – privatedistinction (Evans, 1979; Hanisch, 1969; Squires, 2004).

At least, then, the political can be dened (a) by its ends, (b) by itsmeans, (c) as a specic arena, (d) as a process and (e) as a type of relation

(Pérez Expósito, 2014b). This wide range of meanings explains why theobserver, or the participants involved in political action, can classify very



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contrasting practices as forms of PP. To select one or another implies subtleor radical differences in terms of the ‘who (agencies or collective organisa-tions), what (repertoires of actions commonly used for political expressions)and where (the targets that participants seek to inuence)’ (Norris, 2002,

p. 4). It means that the conception of PP in programmes of CE unavoidablyincludes certain actors and excludes other, validates specic agencies,accepts some practices and disregard other and privileges particular targets.As I will show, in the contemporary approach to CE in Mexico’s secondaryschools, those excluded from PP are precisely the children and adolescentsto which such education is directed.

The depoliticisation of CE in Mexico

Once I have analysed how the political meaning of participation is far from

being homogenous and consensual, and the relevance of the way in whichthe political is understood in CE, in this section I present an empiricalanalysis of the depoliticisation of CE in Mexico, and particularly, in sec-ondary schools from two different areas of Mexico City. The empiricalanalysis relates an examination of the meaning of PP in the Mexican pro-gram of Civic and Ethical Formation (CEF), with students’ representationsof PP, their involvement in practices that exemplify such characterisation,and pupils’ participation in school and broader communities.

Methods

The data are derived from a research with students, teachers and principalsfrom secondary schools located within two contrasting municipalities (del-egaciones) of Mexico City. One of them is the municipality with the highest level of human development (HD) in the city,3 and highly urbanised. Thelatter is among the municipalities with the lowest levels of HD in the cityand it is considered as mostly rural.4

The research followed a sequential mixed-method strategy (Greene,Caracelli, & Graham, 1989; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009), with three stages.

The rst was based on a concurrent embedded strategy (Creswell, 2009) inwhich a documentary analysis of the legal framework for Mexico City’ssecondary schools and the curriculum of CEF from 2007, was treated from both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The second was a qualitativestage comprising three workshops with a group of third-grade students intwo schools (one per municipality)5; four semi-structured interviews withteachers of CEF (two per school); and two semi-structured interviews withschools’ principals (one per school). The third stage was a quantitative phase in which a self-administrated questionnaire was applied to a repre-sentative sample of third-grade students from all the general secondaryschools in these two areas (n = 828).6 The sampling frame for the survey



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comprised 2984 students in 17 schools: 1964 pupils in 12 schools in theurban area, and 1020 in 5 schools within the rural one (SEP, 2012). It wasa probabilistic, stratied and clustered sample with unequal probabilities.7, 8

CE in Mexico: an overview of contemporary proposals for secondary

schools

CE in Mexico is one of the three formative axes in the curriculum of CEFfor basic education.9 The central purposes of CEF are that students:

• Recognise themselves as subjects with dignity and rights, able to makedecisions and commitments that ensure the enjoyment and care of its person, both in its quality of personal life and collective welfare,towards the construction of their life project.

• Understand that human rights and democracy are the frame of refer-ence to make autonomous decisions that enrich coexistence, and toquestion actions that violate the right of people and affect their naturaland social environment.

• Recognise that the characteristics of democracy in a state of law allowthe regulation of their relations with the authority; people and groups,while actively participate socially and politically in actions that ensuremore democratic, intercultural, solidarity-based and fairer ways of life(SEP, 2011b).

These three principal goals summarise the dominant discourse in thecurriculum, and represent the culmination of a signicant change in theorientation of CEF, which began in 1999 with its formal introduction insecondary education. Nonetheless, civic and ethical/moral education in theindependent Mexico can be traced back to the rst half of nineteenth cen-tury. From that period to its latest reform in 2011, changes in the of cialcontent of CEF10 can be seen as a slow transition in the following dir ec-tions: from a combination of Catholic morality and civic indoctrination11 tosecularism; from authoritarianism to a commitment with democracy; from

ideology to a procedural value education; from nationalism to a balance between localism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism; from cultural homo-geneity and male domination to the acknowledgement of cultural diver-sity and gender equity; and, in the case of secondary education, fromadultcentrism to an adolescent-centred orientation.12

Probably more than any other subject, transformations in the orientationof CEF correspond to signicant discursive and practical changes in the broader national political life. For instance, since the student movement of 1968, Mexico began a slow, painful, contradictory, diverse and sometimes

hopeful process of democratisation, which extends from the arena of socialmovements and civil organisations, to its more formal political domain.13 In



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1999, just one year before the rst election of a president from a different political party than the of cial PRI14 – which governed the country from1929 to 2000 – , the subject CEF was introduced in all grades of secondaryeducation.15 CEF represented a major change in the history of civic and

moral education in Mexico (Latapí, 2003; Levinson, 2004). Compared to previous reforms in 1974 and 1992, the programme introduced an innova-tive perspective, which combined a radical redesign of the curricular content with a signicant change in the pedagogical orientation. On the one hand,the scope of the programme ranged from reection on students’ identity,and adolescence and youth’s issues (sexuality, health, addictions and future plans), to participation in society, and the study of rights, law and govern-ment within a democratic polity. On the other hand, the reform made a cri-tique to previous approaches to civic and ethical education based on prescription and indoctrination. It argued for a teaching style that would

lead to the development of practical skills, through which students wouldrelate the subject ’s themes with their interests and daily lives. This pedagogical approach would also promote the practice of democratic values,attitudes and forms of collective and collaborative participation (SEP, 2001).

The 1999 programme af rmed some tendencies from past proposals, likesecularism and commitment with democracy, a procedural value educationunder the idea of values for living together , and a balance between national-ism and cosmopolitanism. But this curriculum introduced new elements to be used in succeeding reforms, particularly a pedagogical approach centred

in adolescence and adolescents, and a discursive inclusion of gender equity(Levinson, 2004).

In 2006, the curriculum of secondary education was substantiallyrenewed again. CEF would have 4 h per week in second and third grades.The reform maintained some of the principles, purposes and orientationfrom the previous programme, but established signicant changes. Now the pedagogical approach would be based on the development of eight civiccompetences, which seek to integrate the teaching and learning of abstract knowledge, skills and attitudes, according to the way they should be jointlydisplayed in specic ‘real’ practices (SEP, 2006). These competences were

dened as (1) self-knowledge and self-care; (2) self-regulation and responsible exercise of freedom; (3) respect for, and appreciation of diversity; (4)sense of belonging to the nation and humanity; (5) management and resolu-tion of conicts; (6) social and PP; (7) adherence to legality and sense of justice; and (8) understanding and appreciation for democracy. According tothe programme, the civic competences are classied in three formative axes(personal, ethical and citizenship formation), and have to be developedacross three dimensions (a specic curricular content to be worked in class-room, cross-curricular content with other subjects and the school environ-

ment) (SEP, 2007).



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The last reform in 2011 was strongly based on the previous programme.The curriculum keeps the eight civic competences and the three formativeaxes, but adds the dimension of students’ daily life to the three alreadyestablished. The programme emphasises the importance of the relation

between school, family and community, especially for practising thosecompetences with a stronger social character. The new programme slightlymodied the denition of some competences, topics and learning outcomes, but keeps the content ’s organisation as in the 2006 programme.

The programmes of 2006 and 2011 ratify previous advances in CEF,some of which originated at the end of nineteenth century and between1910 and 1946, and others of more recent development: secularisation, com-mitment with democracy, a procedural value education, a balance betweennationalism, cosmopolitanism and universal principles, an approach centredin adolescence and adolescents, and gender equity. However, the current

curriculum incorporates an emphasis on the local scale, a commitment withcultural diversity and the acknowledgement of Mexico as a pluriculturalnation with more than 15 million indigenous people from 62 ethnic groups(CDI, 2012).

Students’ exclusion from participation in the arena of formal politics

The recent curricular reforms in Mexico reect and ination in the demandsto CEF. The wide scope of the programmes’ content shows how this subject

has to comply with a growing politically correct discourse about citizenship,which includes a rhetorical commitment with democracy, cultural diversity,inclusion, equity, adolescents’ rights, social and PP, etc. Thus, the pro-gramme embodies an expanded meaning of citizenship, which simultane-ously reects a distancing from its political character. I understand this as a process of depoliticisation of CE, which does not necessarily entail toremove the political from the curriculum, but to employ a particular mean-ing of it, especially in relation to potential practices of participation. In thefollowing, I will show how this kind of depoliticisation means that, on theone hand, the curricular conception of PP depoliticise adolescents’ lives in

the present and, on the other hand, the programme promotes students’involvement in different forms of participation that rely strongly on moraland altruistic motivation, but are deprived of their potential political mean-ing. I contend that students perceive a wide gap between the idealisation of such forms of participation, and the real opportunities they have to performthem in their daily contexts, particularly in school.

PP in the curriculum of CEF: a future-oriented view

The Programme of Civic and Ethical Formation 2007 (PCEF) denes thecompetence Social and PP as follows:



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Participation refers to the activities orientated to pursuing the welfare of agiven collectivity through the mechanisms established in the law, in order toinuence the decisions affecting all the members of society. This participationis a necessary element for democratic life, and expresses itself in society’sorganisations and in political entities such as the political parties.

In order to participate in the improvement of social life, students need todevelop dispositions to construct agreements with others, to collaborate incollective actions in a responsible way, to ef ciently communicate their judge-ment and perspective on different problems affecting the collectivity, and toformulate proposals and requests to persons or social and political institutions.(SEP, 2007, p. 11)

This denition merges social and PP into one concept. Indeed, the wholePCEF seems to evade the term PP. It appears only twice through the wholedocument,16 and both times as ‘social and PP’, whereas the term social

participation emerges six times. Additionally, participation is often pre-sented as democratic participation, which has the same frequency in thePCEF as social participation. However, both terms are never dened withclarity; rather, the programme presents them as synonyms.

In terms of explicit denitions, then, it is not clear what the curriculummeans by PP. Yet, according to how the PCEF describes ‘social and PP’ asa competence, social participation would ‘express itself in the society’sorganisations’, whereas PP would show itself in the ‘ political entities as the political parties’. Similarly, through social participation students might

formulate proposals and requests to ‘social institutions’, while through PPthese would be directed to ‘ political institutions’. Thus, the political charac-ter of participation lies on a separate arena from the social, characterised byits own agencies for participation (Norris, 2002; Pérez Expósito, 2014a,2015): ‘ political entities’, ‘ political institutions’ and ‘ political parties’.Further references in the PCEF with the adjective ‘ political’, clarify that these agencies channel participation within the ‘state’s political organisation’or ‘country’s political organisation’. The programme then reinforces a con-ception of PP restricted within the arena of formal politics, where citizensget involved in order to participate in the government, or having inuencein its structure, composition and/or policies. Accordingly, the PCEF devel-ops only the gure of the political party as the agency par excellence for PP (the ideas of political entities and political institutions are never clari-ed). However, Mexican political parties offer few possibilities for effectivestudent participation in the present. Although some develop an agenda for children and adolescents, adult participants have a considerably more ef ca-cious participation within them, because political rights are reserved in theMexican constitution for citizens over 18-year olds. For adolescents, it israther an agency for participation in the future. Thus, the curricular concep-

tion of PP depoliticises adolescents’ present. At best, PP is understood as



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actions within a domain where students can participate with restricted rights(Batallán & Campanini, 2008).

Students’ segregation from their own representation of PP

Having analysed the meaning of PP in the curriculum, it is necessary toexamine the degree of correspondence with students’ representations of PP,and the extent to which adolescents are involved in forms of participationthat can be regarded as political according to such characterisation.

In the qualitative stage of my research, the rst workshop with studentsin both schools was structured in two sections. Section 2 was organisedaround the use of pictures and videos as a ‘trigger ’ for generating reectionamong students about the meaning of PP (Haw & Hadeld, 2011). Iselected a series of pictures and videos, which in my view represented dif-

ferent forms of PP, including different types of actors, practices, agenciesand targets, according to contrasting meanings of the political.

First, I presented these images with a brief description of their content (Boxes 1 – 5), and asked students to look at them carefully. Then, participants formed two groups and observed the pictures and videos once more.After each image, I asked students to what extent do they consider it anexample of PP, and why?

The analysis of students’ opinions led me to classify the images accordingto the consensus or disagreement they provoked in each school, and between

the two of them. Table 1 shows this grouping and the criteria that I followedfor the classication. Each code within the brackets represents an imagedescribed in Boxes 1 – 5; P designates pictures and V is used for videos.

The distribution in Table 1 shows how students’ characterisations are far from being an homogeneous block; on the contrary, as any social repre-sentation, there are differences and discrepancies among the group of par-ticipants (Doise, Clémence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993). Variations in themeaning and form of social representations between individuals have to dowith their differential social positioning, personal histories (Holland & Lave,2001), their capacity of agency, and the situated conditions within which

representations are communicated (Van Leeuwen, 2008). Yet, their socialcharacter enables the identication of common organising principles acrossindividual variations. An organising principle can be described as a virtualor implicit idea, maxim or image, analytically perceptible through explicit ideas or images in two ways: (1) The organising principle orders the explicit ideas ‘ by giving them a meaning they had not previously had’, or (2) intro-duces coherence between them by securing their common meaning through‘a work of selection’. Thus, the organising principle ‘reduces the ambiguityor polysemy inherent in ideas or images and makes them relevant in any

given social context ’

(Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994/2000, p. 190). These principles also present a generative characteristic; they can be seen as a



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matrix from which people construct specic images of an object. Anorganising principle is an implicit idea that generates different explicit representations.

The analysis of students’ classication of these images reveals the pres-ence of government as a rst organising principle in their representations of PP. When something is clearly understood as PP, government is alwaysthere. This is more evident when people in government are the main participants, as in P12 and P15, two of the pictures representing PP (Box 1). But within this group, as well as in the images described in Box 2, people out of the government are also portrayed as protagonists, however related to it through their actions. Participants involved in PP want to inuence govern-ment ’s composition ( P07 , V05 and V06 in Box 1) and government ’s policiesor laws initiatives ( P02 in Box 2). The government is also represented asopponent or adversary ( P17 in Box 1), or as the actor from whom partici-

pants expect a response to their demands ( P17 in Box 1 and P13, P16 andV01 in Box 2).

Table 1. Students’ classication of selected images according to whether theyrepresent or not PP.

Notes: P designates a picture and V is used for videos.0 = All students said NO, or some students said NO and the rest consented tacit or explicitly.1 = The group is divided: some students said NO and some Might Be.2 = The group is divided: some students said NO and some YES.3 = All students said MIGHT BE or some students said MIGHT BE and the rest consentedtacit or explicitly.4 = The group is divided: some students said MIGHT BE and some YES.

5 = All students said YES, or some students said YES and the rest consented tacit or explicitly.

= Degree of agreement between the two schools in regard to an image representing PP.= Degree of agreement between the two schools in regard to an image not representing PP.



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Box 1. Description of pictures and videos regarded as clear examples of PP by students in both schools.

P05 This picture shows a group of women in the front, holding

together a large banner which says:‘All women, all the rights!’following by a cartoon of a womanraising her right arm. Behind themit seems to be a very large group of people, mainly women, in what appears to be a street protest

P07 The photo depicts an aged womanintroducing her vote in a ballot box.

At its top, one can read‘[DIPUTADOS FEDERALES]federal representatives’, even whenthe rst word is uncompleted, and at the bottom the letters ‘FE’, whichare the two last initials of theElectoral Federal Institute (IFE inSpanish), the institution in charge of organising federal elections

P12 Here, a group of Mexican federalrepresentatives is portrayed. Two of them, the ones standing at thecentre-right of the picture, seem to be talking to each other, while oneof them is signing with his right hand. They also seem to call theattention of some of their colleagues. On the bottom left sidethere are two representativescaptured just before hugging eachother

P15 This picture was taken in a localcouncil in Mexico. We can see at the front ve people raising their hands and if one looks at it carefully, almost every person in thetable raises her/his hands too. Theinformation add to the image in thewebsite where it was taking from,says that they are approving the budget to be exercised in that municipality

P17 The photo was taken during a seriesof teachers’ protests in the city of

Oaxaca, Mexico. Approximately,from the centre to the top of the picture we can see the police forces.From the centre to the bottom someteachers, and in the left corner at the bottom, there seems to be a photographer, probably from themedia, who is being pushed awayduring what appears to be anintense discussion, almost a ght

V05 This video was made by the youthdelegation from one of the main

political parties in Mexico (PRI) ina municipality called Naucalpan. It shows differ ‘types’ of young people, in terms of how they look (trying to depict different juvenileidentities), all of them saying what is to be young, and at the end, thevideo shows altogether invitingyoung people to vote for their party’s candidate

V06 Action takes place in an assembly

of the youth delegation of another important political party in Mexico(PAN). One sees a large group of young people – the majority looksover 18 years old – gatheredtogether in a hall, singing a littlemotto of their organisation: ‘youthaction’. After this, another one that says: ‘we won’

V08 This video captures the moment in

which a group of federalrepresentatives from PRD (one of the three principal parties inMexico) occupy the main platformof their chamber, holding different banners as in a street protest,manifesting their rejection to areform which allows, to someextent, foreign participation in oilindustry



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Box 2. Description of pictures and videos that almost create consensusamong students in both schools according to whether they represent a formof PP.

P02 This image shows two men just

before kissing each other. One of them is holding a ag in his back,which usually is a symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual, andtransgender (LGBT) pride andLGBT social movements. The picture was taken during a protest inMexico City, supporting a local law proposal on homosexual marriageand adoption

P13 The latter, who are seen from the

back, were a group of nurserystudents is depicted in what seemsto be a dialogue to faculty membersof the Autonomous University of Queretaro (a Mexican estate). Thelatter, who are seen from the back,were in a labour strike demanding a better salary. The former, within that context, claimed for the continuationof their education. A group of students at the back of the picture is

holding a banner that says: ‘

Weneed preparation. We have lives inour hands’

P16 The photo shows a group of Argentinean university studentsworking outside the classroom, inwhat appears to be a parking area. It is a symbolic protest in order todemand an improvement in theconditions of the university’sequipment and facilities

V01 A Chilean TV channel made thisvideo. It is a report about a street protest against violence suffered bywomen in households. The reporter interviews some of the participantsabout their reasons of protesting.One can see mainly women singingmottos and holding banners withclaims like: ‘Machista violence isnot allowed. Nor in the street,neither at home.’ A sort of anartistic installation lies on the street.It is made of shoes with labels infront of them, showing the names of women killed by domestic violence.They are arranged as a circle aroundwhich protesters are gathered

Box 3. Description of two examples of images whose character is rather undened because the groups in both schools were divided in their opinions.

P06 This picture shows a group of Indian women during a protest against Coca Cola in New Delhi.They allege environmental damagecaused by a bottling plant that belongs to the transnationalcompany. One of them is holding a banner: ‘Coca Cola go back, go

back ’

V10 The video was made by Greenpeaceand is called ‘Have a break ’, just asthe slogan of ‘KitKat ’, a chocolate bar made by the transnationalcompany Nestlé. A man is workingat his of ce and action is disrupted by the slogan in full screen. Heopens up the chocolate and we see

in close up how it has the form of

(Continued )



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In Table 2, I present some examples of students’ judgement on imageswith a clear or unclear reference to government, depending on either expli-

cit and intrinsic elements in each picture or video, or explicit references inthe contextual information which was given to participants with each image

Table 2. Students’ judgement on images with a clear or unclear reference togovernment.

ImageRelation togovernment Students’ comments

P17 Clear [It is political participation] because they’re asking to theGOVERNMENT for … a better salary … I guess. [Pedro:urban school][It is political] because they work for the GOVERNMENT ,and they judge the GOVERNMENT in order to get more jobs or a better salary. [Ana: rural school]

P02 Clear [T]hose are their rights, (in reference to marriage andadoption), they want them as laws, and that, kind of goeswith GOVERNMENT and politics, and it would be political participation. [Karina. Rural school]

P13 Unclear They are making a demand to GOVERNMENT , they arediscussing about their salary, and students want to go back to classes. [Moses: urban school]

P16 Unclear They are demanding to GOVERNMENT better conditions,isn’t? Better classrooms … [Mario: urban school]

They’re doing that to be taken into account, in order to beconsidered and that others see that the facilities are wrong.[…] It might be [a form of political participation] becausethey are doing it in order to call GOVERNMENT ’sattention. [Karina: rural school]

V01 Unclear Well, it is [political participation] because it involves thelaw, and then there is GOVERNMENT. [Pedro: urban school]

an orang-utan’s ngers. People inthe of ce start to look at himsurprised. He bites the chocolate and blood comes out of it. The blood

falls into his computer ’s keywordand he ends up with the chincovered by it. Action is againinterrupted by a message in fullscreen: ‘Give the orang-utan a break ’. After it, we see images of anorang-utan in a deforestedlandscape. The advert ends with alast message: ‘Stop Nestlé buying palm oil from companies that destroy the rainforest ’

Box 3. (Continued ).



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(see descriptions in Boxes 1 – 3). The quotations related to the images withno clear reference to government, show how students construct a relation-ship to it, in order to be able to classify the video or picture as an exampleof PP. In other words, they add this component to what is represented in

the image in order to anchor it (Moscovici, 1984/ 2000) in their own idea of PP.A second organising principle in students’ representation of PP is the

public character of participation. The images that students disregard as PP(see Boxes 4 and 5) take place in a more ‘ private domain’ than the ones inBoxes 1 and 2, which suggest a rather ‘ public sphere’. On the one hand,the meaning of public seems close to what Habermas presents as the most common understanding of it: ‘We call events and occasions “ public” whenthey are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs’ (Habermas,1967/ 1989, p. 1). In the images classied as PP (Boxes 1 and 2), most of

the actions are portrayed in settings that are relatively open to all: streets( P05, P17 , P02), national chambers of representation or local councils( P12, P15, V08) and public universities ( P13, P16 ). None of these placesare the property of a person or a particular group. In fact, they do not havea single owner, but are usually presented as belonging to the state, thenation, or the People. On the other hand, in the analysis of these images the

public character is given by the fact that participation does not only con-cern or affect the people directly involved, but also implicates a broader group, or a whole society. In other words, the action is undertaken in the

name of others, represents them, its effects have direct implications on thiswider group, or exemplies an action carried out by them.

Box 4. Description of pictures and videos not representing forms of PP according to students’ opinions in both schools.

P01 This picture shows a woman holdingtwo yoghurt pots, probably takenfrom the fridge in her right side,which is full of products. Thedepiction suggests that she is lookingat something in the labels, and maybecomparing something between thetwo

P14 We see a woman and a manstanding face to face. The gesturein the woman’s hand, the openedmouths of both, along with theconnection they established throughtheir eyes, insinuate they arearguing, probably loud. They might be a couple or just two peoplequarrelling

V02 This video presents a group of young people gathered together in a naturalsetting, surrounded by trees. Some of the boys have taken their shirts off, andwear short pants, while the women also seem very relaxed in their clothing.Many are singing: ‘The holy spirit is here. Move inside me, take my mindand my heart, ll my life with your love, oh God’s spirit, move inside me’



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Videos and photos classied as not representing PP (see Boxes 4 and 5)lack of at least one of the previous two meanings of the public: they occur in rather restricted settings, or the actions portrayed concern mainly or exclusively to those presented in the images. For instance, in V07, we see astrong discussion among individuals that seem to be members of a family.This video only provoked one comment per school:

Mario17 (urban school): [it ’s not PP] because they’re only

discussing their problems.Martha (rural school): those are family problems … nothingmore.

In contrast, when I presented a video of a street demonstration of Chi-lean women against domestic and sexual violence (V01), most students didnot hesitate in classifying it as a representation of PP. I asked them why it was so, if the problem is also domestic and has to do with the private realmas the one in V07 . And Elias answered:

Well, it ’s also a family problem, the difference is that they

’re expressing it onthe street [OPEN SETTING ], they are making demands. In the previous one

[V07] it remains there, in the family [ IT ONLY CONCERNS TO THOSE DIRECTLY INVOLVED], in the house [ A CLOSED SETTING ] [ … ].

Both organising principles (a public character and the presence of government) are interrelated. In addition to the sense of the public basedon the openness of the setting and the participants involved, for studentssomething becomes public when it establishes a connection to thegovernment.

The quantitative results of my research corroborate the identication of these two organising principles in students’ representations. One of the

Box 5. Description of videos that almost create consensus among studentsin the urban and rural schools, regarding how poorly they epitomise PP.

V03 The video was taken in an Argentinian school, presumably a private one.Action takes place in the of ce of the school’s counsellor. She receives two

young girls who have a problem between them: one of the girls lent her notebook to the other, who, accidently – she claims – damaged and lost it.The whole sequence presents us a mediation session, in which the counsellor aims to solve the problem. There is dialogue between the three of them, andthere is also debate between the students. At the end, the parties in conict solved the problem and agree a solution

V07 We see a strong discussion. One can imply that it is taking place amongmembers of a family. People involved are in a living room, some are sited,and some stand up. Even when the argument begins between two persons,immediately one hears many voices, and different persons intervening in thediscussion



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requests for an answer (Saris & Gallhofer, 2007) in the survey question-naire was especially designed for researching this issue. It comprises a battery with eight statements representing different forms of PP (SeeBox 6). Statements (a) – (d) represent actions in which no explicit reference

to government is made, whereas statements (e) – (h) include the government as the main actor [(h)], interlocutor [(e)] or show an explicit reference toits policy [(f ) and (g)]. Simultaneously, statements (a), (d), (e) and (h)represent actions with a public character, according to the two meanings previously analysed. In contrast, statements (b), (c), (f ) and (g) represent actions with a private connotation, understood as the lack of those twomeanings. Students were asked to respond whether each of these state-ments represents a form of PP by answering one of the options YES ,UNDECIDED or NO.

I designed the statements based on two overlapped dimensions: (1) The presence or absence of government, and (2) The public or private character.Accordingly, each dimension comprises two factors: government vs. no

government, and public vs. private, respectively. In order to test the validityof these constructs (Bryant, 2000) a conrmatory factor analysis (CFA) was

Box 6. Statements in the questionnaire representing different forms of PPaccording to the factors public – private and reference to government/noreference to government.

(a) A group of people are gathered in a demonstration outside the central of cesof Coca-Cola Inc. in Atlanta, US. They are demanding fair conditions for itsworkers in Colombia

(b) A girl in London decides not to buy a bottle of Coca cola light in her localstore, as a protest against the bad work conditions of Coca Cola´s workers inColombia

(c) An Argentinean family discusses the consequences of consuming Coca-Cola

products at home. One of the children claims that drinking them promotes theterrible working conditions of Colombian workers in that company(d) Members of an international NGO are gathered at the Zócalo square in Mexico

City. They are launching a campaign against the consumption of Coca-Coca products around the world, until the company improves the conditions of itsworkers in Colombia

(e) A group of farmers are in a demonstration outside the Ministry of Government (Mexico). They demand more support from the government for agricultural production

(f) A young man in the supermarket choose to buy fruits and vegetables made inMexico to support the government ’s initiative to solve the poverty in thecountryside

(g) At dinner, one couple discusses about Mexican government ’s proposal to solvethe problems of agricultural production in the countryside

(h) The Mexican representatives in the Congress present their proposals tominimising the problems of agricultural production in the countryside



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carried out. It allowed testing whether the distribution of students’ responsesacross the eight items was not random, but driven by these latent variables(Factors).

The results of CFA (Figures 1 and 2) suggest that the factors Public,

Private, Government and No Government are clearly identied in students’

MODEL A MODEL B (FINAL)

GOODNESS-OF-

FIT STATISTICS

GOODNESS-OF-

FIT STATISTICS

CMIN= 46.430

DF= 19

p= .000

CMIN= 10.197

DF= 8

p= .251

NFI= .802 NFI= .935

IFI= .873 IFI= .985

TLI= .739 TLI= .957

CFI= .862 CFI= .984

RMSEA= .042 RMSEA= .018

ECVI= .117

LO=.097

HI=0.146

Saturated

Model = .106

ECVI= .058

LO= .053 HI=0.73

Saturated

Model =.065

HOLTER .01

= 645 HOLTER .01

= 1630

Figure 1. A conrmatory model generation of the public and private as factors instudents’ responses to eight statements representing PP.

MODEL A MODEL B

Goodness-of-Fit Statistics:

CMIN=96.772DF=19p= .000

NFI=.588IFI=.640

TLI= .259

CFI= .609RMSEA= .070

ECVI=.177 SM= .106LO=.145 HI=.219

HOLTER.05= 258

CMIN=2.678DF=1 p= .110

NFI= .918IFI= .947

TLI= .259CFI= .926

RMSEA= .045

ECVI=.035 SM=.034LO=.033 HI=.046

HOLTER.05=1187

MODEL C (FINAL)

Goodness-of-fit Statistics:

CMIN=4.520 DF= 4 p=

.340

NFI=.943 IFI=.993

TLI=.970 CFI=.992

RMSEA =.013

ECVI=.044 SM= .048

LO=.044 HI=.056

HOLTER .05= 1736

Figure 2. A conrmatory model generation of government and no government presence as factors in students’ responses to eight statements representing PP.



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responses through the statements (observable variables) associated to themin the nal models. These improve all the goodness-of-t statistics to a levelof very good tting (Byrne, 2010), which means that the models represent the data very well. Likewise, the feasibility and statistical signicance of all

parameter estimates is achieved, and the correlation between the factors(latent variables) decreases signicantly in the last model, suggesting anacceptable degree of independence (Byrne, 2010).

Based on these results, in Figure 3 I present a model with the factors Public and Government , which graphically shows how a public character and the presence of government act as organising principles of students’representations of PP.18 Furthermore, the factors Government and Public arederived from the ve statements with the highest percentages of students’answers YES [(E), (H), (D), (F) and (H)] (see Table 3).

GOODNESS-OF-FIT

STATISTICSCMIN=4.723

DF= 4

p= .317

NFI=.956

IFI= .993

TLI=.971

CFI=.992

RMSEA=.015

ECVI=.044

LO= .044 HI= 0.056

SM = .048

HOLTER .05= 1662

Figure 3. A conrmatory model of public and government as factors in students’responses to eight statements representing PP.

Table 3. Statements considered as PP (percentage of students with YES answers).

Dimension 1Statements withgovernment presence

Statements without anexplicit reference togovernment

Dimension2

Statements with a public character

(E) 65.8 (A) 37.4(H) 63.0 (D) 54.6

Statements with a

private connotation

(G) 41.6 (B) 21.6

(F) 45.5 (C) 28.3



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The ndings from CFA correspond to the results in Table 3, whichshows that students classied as PP the statements with an explicit referenceto government, in a higher proportion than statements without it. Likewise,the percentage of students who considered that the statements with a public

character represent PP is higher than the proportion in statements with a pri-vate connotation. Additionally, Table 3 presents in bold letters how the twostatements with the highest percentage of YES responses are the ones with a public character and the presence of government [(E) and (H)], whereasstatements with a private connotation and without a reference to government have the lowest percentage.

The qualitative and quantitative results, then, concur in the identicationof the public character of participation and the presence of government astwo basic organising principles of students’ representations of PP. Thischaracterisation resembles the curricular representation of PP, and therefore,

it also allocates the political into a distant scenario from adolescents’ lives.It is very unlikely that students nd themselves in participatory experiencesthat comply with both principles (the public character of participation andthe presence of government). Students’ responses in regard to their involve-ment in activities that were explicitly presented in the survey questionnaireas public and/or with a clear reference to government are an indicator of it (see Table 4). Participants were asked to respond in one of the followingoptions: (1) Yes, I ’ve done this within the last 12 months, (2) Yes I ’ve done

Table 4. Students’ participation in political action according to their ownrepresentation of PP.

Have you ever participated inthe following activities or organisations?

Yes, I’ve donethis within thelast 12 months

Yes, I’ve donethis, but over ayear ago

No, I’venever done this

A youth organisation linked toa political party or union

12.4% 11.9% 75.6% n = 804

To write a letter to a

newspaper or news programabout any public affair

12.5 12.9 74.7 n = 801

To contact a representative,senator or a municipalauthority

7.4 13.6 79.0 n = 795

To contact a communityauthority

12.6 20.8 66.7 n = 795

Occupy public buildings as aform of protest

6.5 7.9 85.6 n = 798

To contribute to a discussion inthe Internet or social network

about public affairs or social problems

13.6 20 66.4 n = 794



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this, but more than a year ago and (3) I ’ve never done this before. Table 3shows the distribution of pupils’ answers.

In order to present an overview of the frequency of students’ involve-ment in all the activities in Table 3, I constructed a variable (score of partic-

ipation) that counts the number of responses ‘Yes, I’ve done this within thelast 12 months’ per student. The results showed that 542 respondents(65.5%) had not participated in any of these activities within the last year,and only 65 students (7.9%) had been involved in more than two of them.These results are an indicator of the rare involvement of students in activi-ties that exemplify their own representation of PP.

In short, students’ representations of PP are organised under two main principles: the presence of government and the public character of participa-tion. This characterisation concurs with the meaning of PP in the curriculumof CEF, and both represent a view that signicantly excludes students from

political action. Instead of advancing an inclusive conception of PP, CEdepoliticise adolescents’ potential forms of participation in the present. Thisis how the depoliticisation of CE operates without removing the political, but by fostering a particular meaning of it.

Students’ exclusion from alternative practices of PP

It might be argued that students appear as a marginal actor in their ownunderstanding of PP, because in their daily contexts, the political as actions

with a public character and explicitly related to government is rarely visible.As I showed in the rst section, the political can be understood in different and contrasting ways, but even from these alternative meanings, studentsseem to be excluded from PP in the school, family and broader communi-ties. This is so, even when the PCEF encourages student participation inthese contexts.

The curriculum aims to promote student participation in decision-makingat school and other contexts of pupils’ daily life. The PCEF also encourages pupils’ involvement in conict resolution and participation in the resolutionof common problems within different communities. While this type of par-

ticipation is not presented as political, from alternative approaches to the political it certainly might be assumed as such.

In relation to participation in the decision-making processes, the PCEFestablishes, for instance, that students will participate ‘in the denition andmodication of rules and agreements in their contexts of development ’(SEP, 2007, p. 33). Regarding students’ involvement in conict resolution,the PECEF aims that students understand that conict is an inherent part of human relations, because between persons and groups there are relations of authority, power and inuence. It is also an intrinsic element of a demo-

cratic life, because participants have different arguments and positions inregard to issues of common interest (SEP, 2007). Especially, the curriculum



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seeks to foster student involvement in the denition of strategies and actionsfor solving conicts in a non-violent way (SEP, 2007, p. 40). Lastly, partic-ipation in the resolution of common problems is developed in the rationaleof the PCEF, as well as through different blocks of content both in second

and third grades.Because the curriculum acknowledges that students belong to different

communities, from school to the global human community, the programmeaims to promote student participation oriented to solve different problemsacross this range. Alongside, the curricular content encourages activeinvolvement in different stages: denition of relevant problems, design of strategies and courses of action, and their implementation. Table 5 showsexcerpts from the PCEF and from an auxiliary document for teachers of CEF called ‘Guide to Work ’, which illustrate how the curriculum aims to

Table 5. Stages for student participation in the resolution of common problemswithin different communities.

Stages

Denition of common problems

Design of strategies andcourses of action Implementation

The school I [the student]search and analyseinformation in

order to participate in public affairs in afree and informedway (SEP, 2007a, p. 25)I [the student]investigate […] problems relatedto the attention to basic needs in thelocality, thecountry and theworld[To analyse]conicts in theregional, nationalor internationalscale, whichdemand acollective participation […](SEP, 2007b,

p. 59)

I [thestudent]develop

requestsand proposalsabout problemsof collectiveinterest, to be presentedto schooland localauthorities(SEP,2007a, p. 25)

To intervenein theelaboration

of proposalsand in theorganisationof collectiveactivities inorder toimprove thedemocraticlife in[students’]milieu

I [thestudent] take part in local

and schoolorganisationsin order tointervene in problems of collectiveinterest (SEP,2007a, p. 26)

I value myright to participate

in affairsthat contributeto thecollectivewelfare(SEP,2007a, p. 25)The locality

The countryThe world



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involve students in these stages of participation oriented to solving problemsacross different communities.

The curriculum, then, envisions an active student, engaged in decision-making processes, involved in the resolutions of conicts and the denition of

common problems. This active adolescent also designs strategies and coursesof action to be enacted in the school, in the local, national and globalcommunities. All these forms of participation can be understood as political – even when the curriculum does not present them as such – , for instance, fromthose approaches that dene the political by its ends or as a particular process.But, to what extent pupils are involved in this sort of participation?

In the case of school, a rst indicator of pupils’ participation in decision-making is the distribution of students’ scores across a summative averageindex (Langbein, 2012) based on their responses to the following request inthe questionnaire: In your school, to what extent students’ opinion is consid-

ered in decision-making on the following issues? (a) The way in whichcourses are taught, (b) Courses’ content, (c) Learning materials and resources, (d) Courses’ timetable, (e) Classroom rules, (f) School rules and(g) Extracurricular activities (for instance, visiting a museum).19

Participants were asked to respond to every option in a four-point Likert scale: Very Much, Somewhat, Not Really and Not at All . The index rangesfrom 0 to 3, and the individual respondents’ scores can be interpreted usingthe original response categories (Lang bein, 2012): 0 = Not at All, 1 = Not

Really, 2 = Somewhat and 3 = Much.20 The Mean of students’ score across

the index is 1.17 (SD = .68) the Mode is .86, the maximum score was 2.57, but only 12% of respondents score between 2 and 2.57; whereas 46% score1 or less.21 According to this distribution and the value of the mean, it is possible to say that students perceive that their opinion is not really consid-ered in decision-making at school, at least in regard to the aspects presentedin the seven items above.22

In relation to participation in conict resolution, what prevails instudents’, teachers’ and principals’ testimonies is a hierarchised process of resolution, where pupils usually have a passive role. Depending on the con-ict ’s magnitude, few of them are solved among students, and normally the

rst instance of resolution is the teacher. The teacher either solves it, or takes the students to the prefects or school counsellors. From there, theycan be channelled to the deputy head teacher, and nally to the principal. Inthese different stages, there is always the possibility of calling students’ par-ents in order to nd a joint solution. Miriam, a student in the rural school,describes an example of this hierarchised process of conict solving:

Sometimes Jimena [a prefect] solves the problems. If someone goes toJimena, you know that she’s going to mediate the problem […]. Sometimeswhen the problem is big, she takes us with teacher Iris or teacher Marian

[school counsellors], and if it ’s really big, with the principal.



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Teachers, prefects, counsellors, deputy head teachers, principals or parents,sometimes play the role of mediators, as in the case of Jimena. Other times,they act as decision-makers: a sort of juries or judges that decide the way inwhich the conict has to be solved, leaving students out of the resolution

process, as Pedro recalls:

Last year I had a problem with a teacher. […] He called my father […]. Wewere almost nishing talking to the teacher about the problem, and thenanother teacher saw that my father was there, and he started to talk to him.The deputy head came and spoke to them also... and I got suspended […] because they told him that I was doing nothing, and the deputy head was lis-tening, and she said: ‘yes he’s doing nothing, if he want to be seated, let ’ssend him to home.’ And I got suspended two days.

Lastly, students’ participation is very limited in regard to the resolution of

common problems. From their perspective, within the school these rangefrom a lack of material for educational activities or the state of the school’sfacilities, to teachers’ pedagogical styles, and the general quality of their education. In all these areas, pupils gave me a variety of specic examples.Conversely, experiences of student involvement in actions aiming to solvethese problems were scarce.

In regard to participation oriented to solving problems within the sur-rounding communities, only one student in the rural school (Adrian) wasinvolved in the protection of the large green spaces in the area where helives. But this was a personal activity not related with the school. Althoughstudents identied environmental pollution, poverty and corruption as local,national and global problems, they could not recalled a single experienceaimed to participate in their resolution.

A quantitative approach to students’ participation within broader communities corroborates this minimum level of involvement. I developed acomposite index constituted by students’ responses to three different requests in the survey questionnaire: pupils’ perceptions on (a) their partic-ipation in organisations and groups oriented to the resolution of common problems, (b) their involvement in different forms of protest and (c) their

involvement in altruistic forms of participation; those that are exclusivelyoriented to helping or supporting others, others’ causes, or to contribute to public discussions. These three questions comprised 24 items in total. Fivewere explicitly related to students’ local community, two to the internationalcommunity and three with the national one. The rest do not relate the activi-ties or organisations to one specic context. Students were asked to respond between three options: (1) Yes, I ’ve done this within the last 12 months, (2)Yes I ’ve done this, but more than a year ago or (3) I ’ve never done thisbefore. Three different variables were derived by counting the number of responses ‘Yes, I’ve done this within the last 12 months’ per student within



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each request. These were integrated as components in the index. The weight of each component was determined using principal component analysis.

The index ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 means no participation, and 1extensive participation. The Mean of students’ scores was .21 with a SD of .2.

The large SD is partially explained because the Mode was 0. The maximumscore was .85, but only 11.2% of participants scored above .5. These resultsreveal that, according to students’ perception, their participation oriented to theresolution of common problems across different communities is quite limited.

Thus, the forms of participation envisioned in the curriculum, whichcould have an alternative political meaning, turn considerable idealistic.Students, teachers and principals have appropriated them discursively. Theyacknowledge the importance of democracy and participation; teachers stressthe need of creating responsible and active citizens. In class, they discussissues related to peaceful conict resolution, children’s rights and the chal-

lenge of enhancing democracy in the Mexican society. But students perceivea lack of opportunities to practice what the curriculum aims to promote:

Maria: We talk, but we aren’t listened, as it should be. Our opin-ions, points of view, and everything we say stays in the air, because we aren’t listened. They [principal and teachers]say: ‘ok ’, ‘we know you say that ’, but they don’t take it intoaccount, they do nothing with it.

————————————————————

Facilitator/

Interviewer: what is political participation for you?Adrian: to help each other, because sometimes, because we are

young, we are not included. People with money are takeninto account, or older people, and that is wrong, because,supposedly, in political participation everyone …

Ana: (Interrupting) participates

In the last quotation, Adrian and Ana seem to recognise how PP should be, but also acknowledge that people are actually excluded depending ontheir resources or age. In practice, PP is not for everyone, and – as Maria

points out – the school is one of the closest contexts in which studentsexperience this marginalisation. Limited opportunities for student participa-tion in school are so evident, that teachers and principals clearly recognisedthem. For instance, in regard to adolescents’ participation in the Student Society, Teacher Ivan says: ‘I think that [students] don’t take it seriously[the Student Society], because the power they have is very little’. Similarly,the following quotation from the principal in the urban school reveals that,at least in decision-making, students’ participation is almost non-existent:

I think we are not used to it. […] We don’t even have in mind that they

[students] take a decision through a sort of survey, to see what is the most important decision we should make in the school? How do we want to



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approach a given problem? How we would like that the school shows itself to the community? What are the things that make us uncomfortable? […] Weare not willing to participate. This participation doesn’t happen.

Thus, students seem to be excluded from practicing the forms of participa-

tion that the PCEF promotes. From different theoretical perspectives thesecan be seen as practices of PP, however inaccessible to students’ everydaylife.

Conclusions

Based on a mixed methods research in Mexico City’s secondary schools,this article has shown how the contemporary approach to CE, instead of looking at nurturing children’s and adolescents’ politicity, contributes to stu-

dents’

depoliticisation. I have analysed two different ways through whichthis process takes place. First, among different perspectives through which participation can be regarded as political, the Programme of CEF for Mexico’s secondary schools characterises PP as an arena circumscribedwithin the formal political system. In this domain, students will only beincluded in the future, because they are not entitled yet with the politicalrights that are necessary for an ef cacious and full participation in thisarena. Students’ representations of PP concur with the curricular view; but the paper has demonstrated that students’ involvement in forms of participa-tion that exemplify their own representation of PP is very unusual. This

form of depoliticisation does not need to remove the political from CE, but rather to employ a particular meaning of it, which depoliticises adolescents’lives in the present.

The second way in which depoliticisation operates involves the subtrac-tion of a political character from the type of participation that CE aims to promote in students. The curriculum envisions an active student in decision-making, conict solving and the resolution of common problems in schooland broader communities. While this form of participation is not conceivedas political in the programme, from alternative approaches to the political it

can be understood as such. However, the article has shown that students arealso largely excluded from these practices. The forms of participation envi-sioned in the curriculum turn considerable idealistic: students, teachers and principals have appropriated them discursively, but perceive a lack of opportunities to perform them, especially in the school.

In the last years, then, CE in Mexico has prioritise the design of programmes in which the meaning of citizenship is expanded according to adominant discourse about democracy, participation, children’s rights, gender equity, cultural diversity, human rights and so on (Pérez Expósito, 2013).As it has been the case in other countries, while there is an extensive

consensus on the desirability of teaching these subjects, this path has



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undermined the political character of citizenship (Biesta, 2011; Frazer,2007; Pérez Expósito, 2014b; Straume, 2015), and contributed to thedepoliticisation of adolescents. To conclude, I call the attention to the needof shifting the priority of CE from the formal curriculum to the transforma-

tion of school practices. Three curricular reforms in the last 16 years havenot been able to open the school to students’ participation, to construct a pedagogical environment where adolescents’ politicity can develop through participation, instead of being denied. This involves the necessity of thinking about the (re) politicisation of CE in our schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Program for Teachers’ Professional Development,Higher Education type (Programa para el Desarrollo Profesional Docente, TipoSuperior) [UAM-EXB-135].

Notes

1. The normative age in secondary school in Mexico is 12 – 15 years old. It is part of the basic education phase and it is located between primary education(6 – 12 years old) and medium education (15 – 18 years old). The Mexican sec-

ondary school system offers different types of services: general (academic),technical (vocational), tele secundaria (schools were courses are directedthrough television and other technologies, principally in distant rural communi-ties), communitarian (created for attending marginalised rural and urbancommunities, as well as camps of migrant rural workers) and secondary schoolfor workers over 15-year olds (INEE, 2012). The general secondary school isthe most common service; half of all secondary students in the Mexicansystem (public and private) attend these schools (INEE, 2012).

2. Other conceptions of the political as a process are found in Bourdieu (1991,2001, 1979/2002), Rancière (1992, 1995, 2001), and Crick (2004). See PérezExpósito (2014b) for a broader analysis.

3. According to the HD index used by the annual HD report, carried out by theUnited Nations. In order to protect the anonymity of the participants in thisresearch, I do not to provide the specic levels of HD of both areas.

4. According to the Secretariat of Environment (Secretaría del Medio Ambiente)of Mexico City (see www.sma.df.gob.mx).

5. In the urban school, the group comprised 8 pupils; 4 boys and 4 girls. In therural one, there were 4 girls and 3 boys. In both cases, their age ranged between 14 and 16 years old.

6. The questionnaire was especially designed to gather information about twomain. aspects: (1) students’ representations of PP; and (2) students’ representa-tions of their participation in family, school, local, national and global

communities. It was tested and evaluated through a pilot study with 87third-grade students from one urban secondary school, who answered the


http://www.sma.df.gob.mx/http://www.sma.df.gob.mx/


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questionnaire in a 45 min session Among the various methods for testing thequality and functioning of the questionnaire (Klugman, 2011), two wereemployed: (1) statistical analysis (multiple item correlation, factor analysis andcomputation of Cronbach’s α coef cients) and (2) cognitive interviews (Presser et al., 2004) with 10 students. The questionnaire was tested in some usual

problems with questionnaires pointed out by (Beatty, 2004; Willis, 2004), but particularly in: (a) comprehension, (b) keeping interest and motivation, (c)adequacy of response alternatives, (d) social desirability, (e) construct validityand (f) reliability.

7. Following these strategies, the questionnaire was administrated to a sample of 850 students in six different schools, four in the urban area and two in therural. The sample size was calculated considering a value of 1.96 for 95% of condence level, a value of .5 as percentage of the population and a con-dence interval of ±2.84. The response rate was 94%.

8. The qualitative eldwork took place during the academic year 2010 – 2011. Thequantitative stage was undertaken in the academic year 2011 – 2012.

9. Basic education in Mexico includes pre-school (3 years), primary education(6 years, 6 – 12 years old) and secondary school (3 years, 12 – 15 years old).10. I use this term acknowledging that it is the formal name of the subject only

since 1999.11. See Forsyth, Rothgeb, and Willis (2004) and Latapí (2003).12. See Roldán (2012), Latapí (2003), and Levinson (2004) for a historical over-

view of Civic and Moral Education in Mexico.13. See Pérez Expósito (2013) for a distinction between formality and informality

in PP.14. Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party).15. This new subject replaced civics and educational orientation, a course that

was centred more on vocational, psychological and moral orientation, and wasenvisaged to serve as a guide for students’ process of identity formation.16. The PCEF contains the following sections: (a) introduction, (b) rationale and

background, (c) general purpose of CEF, (d) purpose of CEF in secondaryschool, (e) pedagogical perspective, (f) teenagers and CEF, (g) the teacher ’srole, (h) relationship with other courses, (i) content organisation, ( j) content structure and (k) blocks I – V for second and third grades, which specify con-tents, expected learning outcomes, general orientations, and suggest theapplication of certain didactical situations and activities.

17. In order to guarantee the anonymity of my informants, no real names are usedin this article.

18. The model has a very good tting according to the goodness-of-t statistics

values. The feasibility and statistical signicance of all parameter estimates isachieved, and the correlation between the factors (latent variables) is relativelylow, suggesting an acceptable degree of independence.

19. This question was taken from the student questionnaire of the InternationalCivic and Citizenship Education Study 2009, developed by the InternationalAssociation for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA, 2010)Spanish version.

20. The index was developed by assigning a numeric value to each of the four response categories ( Not at All = 0 , Not Really = 1 , Somewhat = 2 and

Much = 3). The lower limit of the index is 0, and, to establish the upper limit,the higher value (3) was multiplied by the number of items in the battery (7).

Therefore, the index originally ranged from 0 to 21. Students’ scores were



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computed by adding the value that corresponds to the category selected by therespondent in each of the seven items. If a student scores 21, it means that inevery single indicator (item) he or she answered the category Much (=3). Inorder to improve and clarify the interpretation of scores, I rescaled the index by dividing the maximum limit (21) between the number of items (7). From

this rescaling, the range of the nal index is 0 – 3. The construction of theindex, by treating a categorical ordinal variable (each single indicator/item inthe battery) as a numerical one, assumes that the former has an underlyingcontinuous scale. As such, ‘the categories can be regarded as only crude mea-surements of an unobserved variable that, in truth, has a continuous scale(Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1993), with each pair of thresholds (or initial scale points) representing a portion of the continuous scale’ (Byrne, 2010, p. 149).

21. n(valid) = 792, missing = 36.22. See Pérez Expósito (2015) for a complete analysis of student participation in

decision-making at school.

Notes on contributor

Leonel Pérez-Expósito is Associate Professor of sociology and education at theDepartment of Social Relations, Autonomous Metropolitan University (Xochimilco) inMexico, and Visiting Scholar in Education (2015 – 2016) at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. He holds a Ph D in education from the UCL Institute of Education (previously Institute of Education, University of London). His main researchinterests are citizenship and political education, adolescent participation in school,school democratisation, and educational assessment and evaluation.

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Documents

2. Citizenship Education in Mexico the Depoliticisation of Adolescence Through Secondary School